Survey Finds Gen Z Most Worried About AI’s Workplace Impact

Some recent research suggests that, generally speaking, many workers are at least a little worried about how artificial intelligence (AI) will affect their employability in the coming months and years.

One 2023 survey, for example, polled 2,000 employed Americans, with more than three quarters (77%) saying they are concerned that AI will cause job loss within the next 12 months. Among this group, 44% said they were “very concerned.” Another 33% indicated they were “somewhat concerned” about this prospect.

There might be a tendency to think that older generations might be slower to embrace new technologies in the workplace, or elsewhere, for that matter. New data, however, suggests that younger employees—Generation Z workers in particular—are actually more apprehensive about how AI figures to affect their livelihood going forward.

In a survey of 3,000 U.S. employees, conducted by D2L, more than half (60%) said they want to use generative AI tools more frequently at work in the year ahead, with 49% saying they’re already using generative AI tools at least once a week.

Still, many workers are fearful that their relative inexperience with the emerging technology could cost them their job in the not-too-distant future. For example, more than a third of respondents (43%) said they thought they could be replaced in the next year by a worker with more advanced AI skills.

Among this group of workers, those identifying as Generation X (those born between the years 1965 and 1980) were the least worried, with just 33% of respondents in this age group indicating concern that they could be replaced by a more AI-savvy employee. Gen Z workers (those born from 1997 onward) appear to be the most worried, with 52% of these employees saying they felt worried about being replaced with someone who’s more comfortable with AI. Forty-five percent of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) said the same.

All that said, younger workers seem to be making an effort to improve their AI knowledge. For example, around one quarter of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they planned to enroll in multiple professional development courses focused on AI in the next year. Just 12% of Gen X-aged survey participants indicated as much.

In an interview with D2L, Chike Aguh, senior advisor with The Project on Workforce at Harvard University, noted that familiarity with technology such as AI will soon be as common as, say, basic word processing skills.

“The same way that an organization wouldn’t hire someone who couldn’t use Google Search in two years,” he said, “if someone can’t use technology to increase their productivity, we won’t hire them because that’ll be as basic as Microsoft Office.”